A Literary Magazine

Issue Fifteen – October 2009

By Julie Van Camp

A washed-out sign leaning into a ditch informed me I was “Entering Whiting.” I was driving north on Vermont Route 30. The year was 1992. Clapboard farmhouses and towering feed silos dotted the sprawling fields. The horizon burned in brilliant blotches of red and

By Alie Wiegersma Smaalders

“I feel like a princess,” was my reaction to life on board an ocean liner from Rotterdam to New York. It was July 1951. I was twenty-seven. I came to the U.S. with other Dutch “Fulbrighters” for a year of graduate study. To prepare us for academic life we spent the

By Kim Secunda

By Barbara Lewis

New love is a form of madness. MRIs have proven that the brains of new lovers light up in the exact same area as those of people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorders. I read this in a weekly news magazine a few years ago, put out just in time for

By Rita Larom

It was the embrace of two women who understood. Maizie had spread the quilt across her bed and called her daughter to join her. She had been working on this quilt for almost twenty-five years but hadn’t shown it to Sunny until today.

By Maya Borhani

By Steve Adams

“What’s wrong with you, Talley? You’re dead out there. On the floor? You know that? Dead.”
Talley knew. He knew it deeply, in the aching calcification of his bones and the sludge that had settled sedimentarily in his brain.

By The Editors

When we launched SHARK REEF in June of 2001, we saw it as a new millenium online zine from a rural grassroots community. We had no thought of how it might evolve or grow up but simply wanted to give serious local writers a place where they could see their work